A Petwo ceremony names the generals and the revolution begins

In Mocombe's account the revolution opens with a religious assembly rather than with an attack. On 14 August 1791, in the mountains of the northern corridor, elders and delegates of the different African nations gathered for a Petwo ceremony. Cecile Fatiman, a manbo mounted by the lwa Ezili Dantor, cut the throat of a black pig and passed the blood to the participants, who swore to unite and to build a society on new principles. She then named the leadership: Georges Biassou, Jeannot, Jean-Francois and Macaya. Mocombe reports the late Max Beauvoir's claim that a human being was in fact sacrificed that night, and that kochon nwa was the French label for maroons. His larger point is that the assembly, run by oungan, manbo, gangan and elders, cannot be squeezed into a Hegelian struggle for recognition. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dates the ceremony and the start of the revolution to 14 August, where Dubois in this same batch argues for 21 August, and rejects Buck-Morss's reading of the revolution through Hegel's master and slave.

The turning point in Fleurant's account of Haiti is the ritual and political congress held by runaway slaves near Cap Francais in 1791, known as Bwa Kayiman. Calling it a congress rather than only a ceremony is the substance of the claim. The gathering produced a general slave uprising, which became a war of national liberation, which ended in the proclamation of independence on 1 January 1804. Colonial law in Saint-Domingue had banned any meeting of slaves by day or night and had made a policy of mixing people of different African origins on the same estate, so that language, lineage and any tie to the homeland they called Ginen would be lost for good. The religion is what defeated that policy. It bound together people from a wide range of African societies and gave them a common reason to strike, and the success of the revolt owed a great deal to that cohesion.

For a whole month after the rising began, Beard has Toussaint keeping the Breda plantation out of the fire. He stood at the head of the estate gang, held them to obedience and stopped insurgents from putting the cane fields to the torch, while every other white household in the district fled to the towns. Madame Bayou de Libertas stayed in her own house under his protection, and the manager himself, camped at Haut-du-Cap, could come back daily to check on the slaves without being killed. The mechanism was personal standing rather than force. When the insurrection grew past what one man could contain, Toussaint had the carriage loaded with valuables, put his mistress in it and sent her to Cap Francais under his younger brother Paul, then used his growing influence to get the whole family out of the colony to the United States.

Smith opens his account of Haitian regional ties before the Haitian nation existed. Within hours of the first shots of August 1791, refugees from the western half of Hispaniola set sail for Jamaica. At that stage they were mostly French planters, and they scattered across the Caribbean leaving durable marks: their contribution to the nineteenth-century development of Cuban coffee, and family names that survive in Jamaica such as Desnoes, Malabre and Espeut. Over the following century and a half the waves widened to include Haitians of every social class, political exiles, and nearly a dozen former heads of state who settled in Jamaica. Smith stresses that the traffic ran both ways, since a good many people from the British islands went the other way and settled in Haiti during the closing quarter of the century. His point is that regional integration long predated any treaty.